The Voter Suppression Chronicles: When the Roberts Court all but nullified the Voting Rights Act, it said the pre-1965 practices were long gone. New hearings by the House make clear: They’re back.
The chief justice of the US Supreme Court baldly making bad-faith arguments like this is depressing. And there he goes again, baldly lying. We can’t function as a democratic republic because the...
While the new Democratic House majority was eager to revive the struck-down “preclearance” provisions of the Voting Rights Act for frequent offenders like North Carolina, Justice John Roberts, in his Shelby decision, had issued a challenge to Congress: Prove that we still need it. “History did not end in 1965,” Roberts tartly observed. “Coverage today is based on decades-old data and eradicated practices” like Jim Crow–era literacy tests and poll taxes, he wrote. “The conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions. Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically. Largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voter turnout and registration rates in covered jurisdictions now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.”
The chief justice of the US Supreme Court baldly making bad-faith arguments like this is depressing.
The VRAA, authored by Alabama Representative Terri Sewell, meets Roberts’s demand for a “contemporaneous” formula. States with 15 or more voting-rights violations in the last 25 years would qualify; right now, that would include most of the South—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia—along with California and New York. (Arizona and Arkansas are right on the edge, and Ohio is coming up quick.) The law would task the Justice Department with maintaining a list of violations in every state and county. And once again, the states that make a habit of suppressing voters would have to submit every voting change, right down to a new polling location, for approval.
When Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Shelby, he took issue with singling out particular states for federal oversight. “In 1965, the States could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics,” the chief justice wrote. “Today the Nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.” But even if you granted Roberts’s rosy view that Alabama had become just another Vermont when it came to voting, the reality is clearly different in 2019. While many blue states are passing progressive laws—including their own versions of parts of the For the People Act—Republicans in red and battleground states have spent the last six years winding back the clock to the good old days when voting was a (white) privilege, not a right.
And there he goes again, baldly lying.
We can’t function as a democratic republic because the very same states captured by Republicans will continue to do everything they can to suppress voters who are disproportionately not Republicans. It boggles my mind that we’re still litigating this. I guess we need a final constitutional amendment to settle this shit: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of bullshit."
The chief justice of the US Supreme Court baldly making bad-faith arguments like this is depressing.
And there he goes again, baldly lying.
We can’t function as a democratic republic because the very same states captured by Republicans will continue to do everything they can to suppress voters who are disproportionately not Republicans. It boggles my mind that we’re still litigating this. I guess we need a final constitutional amendment to settle this shit: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of bullshit."